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Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Icy Demons/Pit Er Pat - Split 7"

Icy Demons/ Pit Er Pat – Split 7”

Polyvinyl, 2005

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2008

Price: $.50

7”s seems sort of obsolete these days. What’s the point of
paying $4 for two tracks when you can just buy the whole album for $15 (unless
the songs on the 7” are exclusive, but even then it seems fiscally no thanks).
But fifty cents or a dollar? Sign me up. When you can dig through the bargain
bin at Love Garden and pick out four or five singles for four or five bucks (or
less) based on a cool cover design or great band names, it restores some of the
fun back to being a music consumer. The Internet helps to make most of your
decisions for you and supplies you with ample information and MP3s of a band so
you can pretty much eliminate any sense of risk. Instead of hearing the single
and buying the album, you hear the single and buy the MP3 on iTunes for a buck
fifty. I actually really like that model, but then again, I bought so many
shitty CDs in the 90s because they had one song I liked. Thanks to the
Internet, I never have to drop $15 on an album that may or may not let me down.
Albums I buy (unless they’re $3 at work and it’s like why not) are thoroughly
vetted before being added to my collection. And cheap 7”s is how I keep my
music nerd flame lit. Despite having picked up this 7” five years ago, this is
the first time I have actually listened to it. 2007-2009 was a great period for
acquiring myriad pieces of cheap vinyl, and this whole blog exists to rectify
the fact that I had hardly listened to any of the stuff on which I was dropping
small amounts of dough. Both bands sound like that bread and butter “art rock”
Polyvinyl was churning out at an alarming clip in the mid 00s. Icy Demons
synthesized keyboards sound straight outta Deerhoof and even though the band is
from Chicago, for some reason the singer sounds like he is singing in Japanese.
It’s your usual spastic art pop with guitars that jut out and interesting drum
patterns. It’s actually a nostalgic sound for me, something that takes me back
to my early college years when bands like this played at the Jackpot Saloon all
the damn time. Pit Er Pat also have a lot of that Deerhoof-y art rock thing
going on. Mostly it's the way the synthesizers are tuned (tuned? That can't be right). Really, it wasn't just Deerhoof. This whole sound got pretty generic in the fallout of dance punk in the mid to late 00s, but at least it was weird and experimented with weird arrangements. Seems like these days you just pluck four random 20 year olds off the street in Brooklyn, give'em tight pants and drug problems and you've got a breakout hit on your hands. That was me doing my best Abe Simpson, expressing my outright fear and disappointment with the future I've aged into.